The storyline of a children’s doll coming to life has long been a concept in horror movies and TV. From Talky Tina in the TV series The Twilight Zone to silver screen Chucky, sentient dolls have always fascinated us.
Fortunately, in real-life we don’t have evil demons like Talky Tina and Chucky running around causing chaos. However, in recent years ‘smart’ toys and dolls have appeared and they have the potential of making the future of our children a little more grim and haunting. These AI-enabled toys and dolls are not just interactive devices to keep our children busy or to teach them things. These devices have to potential to be intensive data collecting tools that will enable marketers to target children and their parents with hyper-personalized advertising.
Key Issues of Advertising to Children
Historically, advertising to children was conducted through multiple media including TV, radio, and print. The rise of digital media has accelerated the adoption of children’s advertising through online content, video games, mobile apps, and influencers. This has created a virtually unlimited stream of sources and technologies impacting children’s day-to-day lives. According to a recent study published in the American Journal of Pediatrics, children under 7 years and younger have limited ability to understand that the intent of an advertisement is to impact their behavior. The new era of digital advertising is giving less control to parents and more control to marketers to impact children’s behavior. Simply put, marketers creatively integrate advertisements into digital content that children are simply not able to recognize as ads.
The research shows the same is true for school-age children who might be able to recognize advertisements, but often are not able to resist them when they are embedded within trusted social networks filled with celebrity influencers. These advertising tactics are driving an increasing need in children to be materialistic by using sponsored unboxing videos through child influencers. For example, YouTube Influencer Ryan Kaji generated $22 million in in revenue in just one year by primarily targeting children.
A critical issue of advertising to children is also that children lack critical thinking to understand that an advertisement may be promoting a harmful product. For instance, children’s obesity is correlated with food/drink products that are marketed to them through their favorite celebrities or influencers. In an insightful study, Bragg studied which products were endorsed by 163 population influencers. Of the 590 endorsements made by the 163 celebrities in the sample, consumer goods (eg, fragrances, makeup) represented the largest endorsement category (26%), followed by food and beverage (18%). Sixty-five celebrities were collectively associated with 57 different food and beverage brands, with the majority promoting sugar-sweetened beverages and other foods that lacked nutrition. By the way, Justin Timberlake, Maroon 5, and Britney Spears had the most food and beverage endorsements. Similarly, although cigarette advertising is banned on television and radio, e-cigarettes are being promoted through social media, and music videos. This has been correlated to the usage in teenagers in current and future consumption.
Furthermore, a critical issue of marketing to children is how their perception of their body image is changing with the rise of social media. As Amy Morin reports, children as young as three prefer game pieces that depict thin people over those representing heavier ones. Through using celebrities and influencers, marketers are using social media to further propel this vulnerability to their advantage and let young children and teens conform to their brands to achieve a desirable body image.
Who’s collecting children’s data and why?
Advertising to children is not only molding their personality and behavior in compliance with the brand’s desired outcome, but also providing marketers with enormous amounts of data. With technology toys in the hands of children, data has the potential to be collected through any device or toy that is connected to Wi-Fi. In essence, children are being “datafied” and profiled at a very young age without them having control of how their data is being collected and for what purpose.
As reported earlier, the American Academy of Pediatrics, reports that data is regularly collected in children’s apps. This data collection occurs despite having regulations such as the Children’s Online Privacy and Protection Act (COPPA) in the United States. COPPA provides guidelines to protect children’s data privacy, but there are loopholes and gaps that make data collection of all-ages possible. The other caveat in marketing to children is that while children are often not aware of what they’re being advertised, parents are also giving consent without knowing the ramifications of that consent. The problem, of course, is that most people do not read ‘Terms and Conditions’ that accompany apps and other devices. Would a parent even think about reading ‘Terms and Conditions’ while they are happily watching their child unbox that new birthday toy!
Data Collection in Smart Toys and Dolls
Talking dolls began in the 1920s, when Dolly Rekord was introduced. This early invention was a simple toy that spoke nursery rhymes though a wind-up phonograph mechanism. In the 1980s and 1990s, a number of interactive talking dolls were introduced including Teddy Ruxpin (1985), Furbi (1998) and Tomagachi (1996). The 2010s saw the rise of ‘connected smart toys’ such as Cozmo (2016) that had advanced features such as image recognition, sensors and the ability to recognize emotion on the user.
As technology and AI has advanced, children’s toys are increasing breaching a child’s privacy by collecting data without consent. For example, “My friend Cayla” was marketed in 2016 as an interactive doll. However, it was later learned that the doll recorded the conversation of kids and sent the recordings to doll manufacturer Genesis and another voice recognition company called Nuance. Similarly, the Cloudpets scandal (2017) shook parents as there were more than 2 million voice recordings between children and parents that were hacked.
With technological advancements in AI, smart toys and dolls are becoming increasingly sophisticated and giving a human-like experience to children who share their deepest secrets as if the device was their best friend. According to research in the Big Data and Society Journal, “young children are highly influenced by the spoken nature of conversational agents, respond to the agents at a very young age, and imbue the agent with human like qualities”. In the future, one can imagine that the talking doll might even directly sell a product or brand extension to the young child. Perhaps a CloudPet will tell a young user that it is lonely and that it wants another CloudPet friend. Further, based on the data collected on the child, there is potential that the message can be individualized for each child. This is easily done by simply having the doll call the child by their name when the request for an additional purchase is made.
Another example of a smart doll is Mattel’s Hello Barbie, which was introduced as the world’s first interactive doll in 2015. This smart Barbie doll incorporated voice recognition technology to respond to children’s questions. In this way, the doll could capture a great deal of information not only about the child, but about the entire family. This information can then be sent to third-parties and can be used by advertisers to market effectively to children.
Despite the legal implications for protecting child’s privacy, there has been a surge of smart toys claiming to benefit a child’s experience. COPPA law’s stresses on protecting child’s data collection through requiring verifiable parent’s consent before collecting their personal information. Further, COPPA says that devices should not prompt a child to disclose more information than “necessary” and companies should only keep personal information as long as it fulfills the purpose for which it is collected. Based on COPPA law, any smart toy manufacturer that doesn’t abide by this regulation can be charged a fine up to $40,000.
However, even with COOPA regulations, action against smart toy manufacturers are practically non-existent. There are also a number of cases where connected toy manufacturers failed to ensure the security of the information they collected.
An alarming implication of data collection from children is how this data can be used for marketing in the short and long run. Today’s children will have the largest footprint in history, therefore their entire behavior over their formative years maybe collected and saved. This data collected can be enough to use algorithm and prediction analysis to decipher children’s needs, and potentially impacting their freedom and independence in the future. The Future of Marketing Institute calls for more investigation and regulation into the marketing implications of data collection via smart toys and dolls.
Written by:
Nida Zahid
Managing Editor, Future of Marketing Magazine
Professor David Rice
Schulich School of Business, York University
Executive Director, Future of Marketing Institute